Jeffrey Dean Morgan portrays hotel magnate Ike Evans in "Magic City." The series captures the fast life of Miami Beach fueled by the Rat Pack, the mob, the CIA and anti-Castro forces coalescing after Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan portrays hotel magnate Ike Evans in "Magic City." The series captures the fast life of Miami Beach fueled by the Rat Pack, the mob, the CIA and anti-Castro forces coalescing after Fidel

Olga Kurylenko makes an entrance in one of the series' fabulous gowns.

Olga Kurylenko makes an entrance in one of the series' fabulous gowns.

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Jakle: Sin, sex and danger in 1950s Miami

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The new Starz drama "Magic City" is full of fabulous vintage clothes and Rat Pack nostalgia. It's the era of John Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, a time when cocktails were plentiful, smoking was cool and glamorous gowns hugged hourglass figures.

Sound like "Mad Men"? Don't bet on it.

"As far as the shows being comparable, they're really not, other than, I guess, the year," "Magic City" creator and executive producer Mitch Glazer said in a recent conference call.

Start with the settings: New York versus Miami.

" 'Magic City' is set in an ethnic, you know, Jewish/Cuban world," a tourist town, Glazer said.

The scripts were mined from Glazer's own experiences growing up in late-'50s Miami Beach. He worked as a hotel cabana boy while his father toiled as an electrical engineer for iconic hotels such as the Fountainebleu.

"Magic City" opens on New Year's Eve 1958. Havana has fallen to Fidel Castro's army; labor unions are trying to bring about change; the mob is pulling everyone's strings.

"It was such a defining moment for Miami," Glazer said. "You went from a city that had 30,000 Cuban immigrants to I believe 250,000 18 months later.

"It's a story that I've been wanting to tell for a long time. The cool thing was, besides the aesthetic and the beauty and the glamour … there were also really amazing things happening in the world. So I felt that if I could tell a story of this family under siege … I could also funnel these great stories … from the CIA … and civil rights."

That family is headed by visionary Ike Evans (Jeffrey Dean Morgan of "Watchmen"). He built and runs the Miramar Playa, the most luxurious hotel on Miami Beach. A widower who's remarried, he also has a young daughter and two grown sons.

"He's a family man in his heart," Morgan said. "I loved that Mitch had written this guy who loves his family (but has) incredible pressures. Like all of us, he has trouble making decisions, and he makes the wrong ones at times, and there are repercussions."

Some of these are truly scary. In the first episode, Ike grows frustrated with an inflexible union leader who plans to disrupt his planned New Year's Eve celebration and makes a kind of pact with Ben Diamond (Danny Huston), a gangster so vicious he's nicknamed "The Butcher." One of the creepier visuals is a watery grave full of corpses.

There's breathtaking beauty as well, from stunning beaches to old architecture to sumptuous sets.

"For me, it's called 'Magic City.' The city was always going to be a character," Glazer said. "I'm such a Miami guy that the only time I ever saw Miami accurately portrayed was when Michael Corleone goes to visit Hyman Roth in 'Godfather II' and you pull up to that little middle-class Jewish home. … So, it was a mission of mine to get down there and use the city, you know, the largest kind of existing pre-1959 architecture in the world is that deco area, and the light and the smells."

It also helps that Starz is a channel with few language or other restrictions, allowing the actors to get real as well.

"We show real relationships," Morgan said, "and sometimes people get naked in their real relationships."

Nudity, in fact, is plentiful, from scantily clad showgirls to a skinny-dipping wife to patron-pleasing prostitutes.

Olga Kurylenko ("Quantum of Solace") plays Vera, a kind of gypsy outsider from Eastern Europe who embraces the roles of Ike's wife, stepmother to his children and hotel queen to his king. Drop-dead stunning in the show's strapless, full-skirted fashions, she couldn't get enough of the period designs by Carol Ramsey.

"Everything was just so glamorous, and women looked very feminine," Kurylenko said at a recent Starz press session. "It's probably the most beautiful style in history, the '50s."

Morgan, already looking forward to the show's promised second season, compared "Magic City" to a train, "a slow burn" at first but "picking up speed."

"What we're seeing now are Ike's wheels turning," he said. "He's going to have to get involved. He may have to get his hands dirty. Oh, hell, I'll say it: He's going to get his hands pretty dirty."